Alakeel 1
Competitive Intelligence
Topic Introduction Part
In the business world. The main goals are to maintain a competitive advantage over rivals competitors. Competitive advantage talks about the continuous activity that provides an ongoing update of activities in the marketplace (Underwood, 2002). A good competitive intelligence process gives early signals that allow a company to act in anticipation of strategies of a competitor or to counter new technologies that will affect their industry. Competitive intelligence involves the identification of risks and opportunities in the early stages to allow an organization to adapt its strategy or change it if needs to be. The information gathered about the competitors is usually publicly available aiming to make an organization more competitive in regard to its area of operation.
With a competitive intelligence, a company puts effort to gather information about its competitors, its industry, and the business environment. The information gathering is important for any organization because the process helps the firm to create its business strategies also and identify competitive errors available in their industry. The information gathered also can be used to forecast competitors’ moves. But, the information should legally be gained in accordance with the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals SCIP Code of Ethics (Underwood, 2002). I’m writing this paper to analyze the goals of competitive intelligence, the process of competitive advantage, ethical issues in competitive intelligence, and the competitive intelligence analysis techniques being used in the business.
Literature Search
Researchers in the past have showed investigations on the concept of competitive intelligence. Bartes (2014), investigates the objectives of competitive intelligence as part of corporate development strategy. According to the author, the results of competitive intelligence is produced in such a way that it assists in operational management in an organization. As the writer states, one of the goals of competitive intelligence is it helps to keep the corporation to keep their market position as it is. The other objective is to help the expanding of the business. The third objective according to the author is for the corporation not only to keep hold of its current market share but also to dominates in the future. Bartes reviewed sources dealing with competitive intelligence and subjected the information to observation, analysis, synthesis, comparison, induction, and deduction. He found that competitive intelligence is crucial in strategic management and corporate strategy. In the work, the author wanted to make sure that competitive intelligence is very important for strategic management in any organization that wishes to succeed in the highly competitive business.
Several factors come into play in the development of competitive intelligence in an organization (Nasri & Zarai, 2013). According to the authors, busin...
